Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers’ Libraries ed. by Richard W. Oram, Joseph Nicholson (review)

This book is both a reflection of, and a contribution to, the growing movement around taking interest in books and libraries not primarily for their printed content but for the value in their provenance or physical characteristics. Its focus is on the private libraries of Anglo-American authors, primarily but not exclusively those who would be thought of as literary writers, and it is intended partly as a practical manual for both librarians and researchers, and partly as an awareness-raising vehicle around the topic in general.

Its principal editor, Richard Oram, is based at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where the value of preserving and identifying authors’ libraries as special collections has long been recognised. They have been doing this for several decades, for well-known names like Joyce and Waugh as well as lesser-known ones like Compton Mackenzie and Ronald Sukenick, so he is well placed to write an introductory chapter summarising the issues and challenges around capturing and studying authors’ libraries. They have obvious potential insights into their owners’ thought processes and interests, particularly if annotated, but libraries are fluid things, with books coming and going throughout a lifetime, and the collection left after an author has died may be only a fragment of what was once owned. Should we look more at the titles on someone’s shelf, or the state of the books, taking more notice of the ones which are falling apart than the ones which are pristine? Oram provides a brief overview not only of the historical development of authorial libraries, but also of the growth in interest and attention paid to them. The following chapter, by his co-editor Joseph Nicholson, is aimed at librarians and is written as a practical manual for the arrangement and cataloguing of writers’ libraries within larger library systems, dealing not only with the niceties of MARC cataloguing but also with such questions as ‘shelving: together or apart?’, and ‘classification’. This is all standard stuff for those within that world, and a chapter to be speed-read by those who can remain blissfully unaware; it is technically comprehensive, but could perhaps ask some more fundamental questions around whether the purpose of holding such books in libraries is sufficiently driving the cataloguing philosophy (too much respect for librarians’ sacred cows?).

The next chapter by Kevin MacDonnell, a librarian-turned-bookseller, provides a very different perspective, setting out the realities of dealing with authors’ libraries in that world, and bursting some bubbles along the way. Two following chapters offer case studies on particular collections, both the surviving libraries of twentieth-century poets: Anne Sexton (c. 800 books now at the Harry Ransom Center, by Amanda Golden) and Ted Hughes (c. 5000 books now at Emory University, by David Faulds). The latter has some interpretational challenges (the books are mostly modern paperbacks, and ‘it was extremely rare for Hughes to mark a book in any way’), but Faulds draws out the evident interest in some particular categories of books within the whole, including schoolbooks and those associated with Sylvia Plath. Chapter six, ‘Writers and their libraries’, comprises transcripts of interviews held with a variety of living novelists and poets about their current libraries, which range in size from about 3000 volumes (Jim Crace, Russell Banks) to 10,000 plus (Iain Sinclair, Ted Kooser). These are conversational, anecdotal, and not necessarily reverential to their subject: ‘It seems that writers have libraries and ordinary folk have shelves of books. The implication is that the relationship between writers and their books is necessarily grand and meaningful and mutually rewarding . . . I don’t recognise that myself’ (Jim Crace).

The final chapter, which runs to over a hundred pages and occupies almost half the book, is a ‘location and bibliographical guide to writers’ libraries’, arranged alpha betically by author and offering a gazetteer of what is known about the...